Crafty #TBT | Lovestruck Vintage Style Millinery

Happy Crafty Throw Back Thursday! I was going to skip #tbt today but decided this morning to revisit the Lovestruck Millinery Flower tutorial with you all. Yesterday when I posted the Tim Holtz messenger bag with the large brown crinoline flower several people asked for a tutorial on how to make that flower. This is it!

To make the larger flower from the tote bag, you simply start with a larger felt base. You can make the base any size you want. The petals will extend off about 1″ from the base, so adjust the size of your base plus 1″ to get the finished size you want. For example, this flower is about 5″ across so it uses a 4″ round base.

The other difference between this flower and the one in the tutorial is that the brown flower doesn’t have stamens in the center. Instead, you just keep adding petals until you can’t fit any more in. Because the base is larger, you will have more rows of petals which will make a much larger and fuller flower. The original Lovestuck flower only had a few rows.

On the original flower I dyed all the petals the same. For the flower one the bag, I dyed them different colors, using different browns and neutrals from the Distress Stain collection. I did not add white tips because I wanted the flower to stay very brown and aged looking. Bright white would not go well with that look.